Feeling Right at Home in Unfamiliar Territory

Dancers from the Pilobolus Dance Theater perform “Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving,’” created by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the choreographer Michael Tracy, at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College.Credit
Joseph Mehling

HANOVER, N.H. — The central green at Dartmouth College here, lined by handsome old redbrick buildings and spires, makes for an archetypal New England campus. One of these buildings, the Hopkins Center for the Arts from 1962, without breaking the idyllic tone, still looks relatively modern as architecture. The modernity continues indoors. The Hop has become one of the leaders in commissioning modern-dance works. In the last three years there have been world premieres by Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and others.

For no other company, however, is a season at Dartmouth truly a return home as for Pilobolus. Thirty-nine years ago, when the student body was all male, this company emerged from a modern-dance class taught by Alison Chase, and the Hopkins Center had been one of the reasons the young men who formed the Pilobolus Dance Theater chose to study here in the first place.

The expressive imagery of the Pilobolus acrobatic poetry — by turns biological, clownlike and Edenic — made it a new genre. The college library houses the company’s extensive archive — which includes films, photographs, notes and more — that incidentally reveals how quickly the company’s booking fees grew, in the 1970s alone, from $300 (for performances at another New England college) to $25,000 (for a season at Sadler’s Wells in London). The library is also presenting a small exhibition to commemorate Jonathan Wolken, one of the company’s founding dancer-choreographers and long-term artistic directors, whose death this month raises large generational questions: Can or should Pilobolus survive its makers?

Pilobolus dedicated its performances over the weekend at the Hop to Mr. Wolken’s memory. But the program’s main event was a new work, “Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving,’ ” created by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the choreographer Michael Tracy, another of Pilobolus’s long-term artistic directors, in collaboration with the company’s dancers.

It’s obviously a departure. Neither at Pilobolus nor anywhere else have I seen this kind of dizzying overlap of cartoon, film, silhouette theater, and live dance. And yet it also picks up on, and refreshes, aspects of Pilobolus that have been there since the beginning: the dream logic, the clowning, the sense of physical liberation that’s only at times highly sexual, and the defiance of categorization. Pilobolus survives in such a piece and evolves.

“Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Playing’ ” also includes the death of its central character. Hapless (or Hap) is related to the old American cartoon character Happy Hooligan, but also to the role Charlie Chaplin often played and to ballet’s Petrouchka. He’s an innocent abroad, a Little Fellow who loves but whose girl is also pursued by a man who’s twice his size and prone to aggression. But we also see Hap at the dawn of consciousness and, like Orpheus, in the realm of the dead. It’s a fabulously crazy tale, whose tone stays cartoony.

Mr. Spiegelman could have told it entirely in cartoon terms. That, however, would have been a smaller and simpler piece. Here Hap’s life is continually presented as a show in performance, with multiple layers of reality. We see the story told as a cartoon, we see it being enacted by the dancers as silhouettes (now growing large or small), we see the dancers themselves 3-D in the foreground, and we see bewildering graftings of one genre onto another. Silhouettes and cartoons appear in the same frame and interact.

At one point live dancers appear to be throwing moving shadows onto the screen behind them — until it turns out that these silhouettes actually have lives of their own. In a great scene the screen lifts to reveal lights, apparatus and characters. The effect is so strange and so revelatory in the context of the story that it’s as if we’re being given a fleeting glimpse of the inner workings of the universe.

The movement and dancing take the story to further levels, with the heroine climbing effortlessly to stand on a man’s shoulders. (Here that becomes a cartoon effect.) When she and Hap die, there are dancing skeletons, a dancing devil and other layers of reality. It’s all light, dry, fast moving. Part of the pleasure of the production is the music, which is, like so many Pilobolus soundtracks, a collage. Ranging from Erik Satie to Yma Sumac, it maintains the comedy. My only reservations are one tiny moment in which Mr. Spiegelman seems to be self-referential and an ending that is low key when it could have easily been one of theatrical transcendence.

At the Hop, Hap was followed by “Gnomen,” choreographed in 1997 by Mr. Wolken and Robby Barnett, another founding father and longtime artistic director. It’s a quintessential example of acrobatics rendered as self-transforming Pilobolan poetry, and a superb ending to the program.

They both followed the intermission, and they came as a great relief after the first three items, “Redline” (2009), “Rushes” (2007) and “Walkyndon” (1971): each a distinct work of art but currently looking flimsy. Although Pilobolus has always been popular, it has had many opponents — “It’s so sophomoric!” a friend once remarked — and these three works made me see why.

But “Hapless Hooligan” transcends that sophomoric aspect by being elaborately enthralling. And “Gnomen” goes right to the heart of Pilobolus’s imagery. It seems to show us protozoa evolving into one species after another.